Quotes About Madness

I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness.

Behold, I teach you the Overman! He is that lightning, he is that madness!

Madness, Brother Masseo, is the salt which prevents good sense from rotting.

What sort of madness comes over us to make us throw ourselves on another man, when he's done nothing to us, and bite him, cut his nose off, tear his ear out, run him through the guts - and all the time, calling on the Almighty to help us! Does it mean we want the Almighty to go and cut off noses and ears and rip people up?

Para contemplar la belleza de Layla hay que tener los ojos de Majnún.

There are plenty of young people who are appalled by the behaviour of the older generation, rightly, and are dedicated to trying to stop this madness before it consumes us all. Well, that's the hope for the future.

Drunkenness is a voluntary madness.' Can't think right off who said that, but it rings true.

In him the rage held cold, an iced fury as the hot licks of blood and madness swirled around him. His brother. Young, innocent, suffering. The life draining out of him, out of a body wracked with pain

If he lost his mind in Lunacy, would he ever have had it to lose?

Now that I am calmer I see the absolute impossibility of going on leading a life which was killing her & driving me nearly mad. For to keep up your spirits & a laughing face while ruin is staring you in the eyes & misery is tearing your heart to pieces is a struggle which is fruitless . . . My last years have been a living hell to me.

Not all crazy people are brilliant, but almost all brilliant people are crazy.

I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

Somewhere outside the hospital, in a motel room full of bloody towels with his tool box of knives and needles, or driving down the highway to his next victim, or kneeling over a dog, drugged and cut up in a dirty bathtub, is the man a million dogs must hate.

In them and between them flourished the heat of life, the madness of love, and the sudden absolute certainty of the end of all that they knew.

Writers are made -- forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities -- over the course of many, many moons.

Solo un loco bailaría estando sobrio.

It is our own evil thoughts which madden us.

He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, I've come to understand that grown-ups, mad or sane, ought really to be accorded the same respect. In this sense, nobody is actually crazy, just not understood.

The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained

Better to believe that sane people were sane and crazy people were crazy and you could put the two types of people on opposite sides of a wall and keep them separate, clean and tidy. Without that, where did the lunatics go? Where had they gone? Were they among us? Were they us?

I write as if to save somebody's life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

There have been times when only a hair's-breadth has intervened betwixt myself and the seething devil-ridden world of madness; for the hideous knowledge, the horror- blackened memories which I have carried so long, were never meant to be borne by the human intellect.